


phoenix, rising

by seaer



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Gen, Kuwei-centric, Multi, Murder Mystery, Shu Han, Symbolism, alexa play Arsonist’s Lullaby by Hozier, asian of chaos, ominously relevant folklore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-02-17 22:36:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21950818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaer/pseuds/seaer
Summary: “It’s taking me every ounce of my willpower right now not to hurl you out the window and have you publicly flogged,” she hissed. “Did you know that by a mere 9:15 several of the patrolling Grand Palace guards reported smelling smoke? Did you know that by 9:20 every bastard and their mother down in Novokribirsk could probably see Os Alta half on fire? Does this sound familiar to you?”“It was, like, six trees!” It had not been six trees.
Relationships: Kuwei Yul-Bo & Original Character(s)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 32
Collections: Grishaverse Big Bang 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> my fic for the grishaverse big bang! ++ would not have been possible without the support of my gang (y’all r the best)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter warning: graphic description of a dead body (the section after the italics)

_The Swordsman And The Blood-Beast_

_In the days when monsters still roamed the land, tall as ships with eyes looking down like stars, the Swordsman heard in a tavern the news of a beast in Tsibeya. “Six feet on all fours,” said the boy who served his dinner. “When the livestock bleed, it grows bigger yet.”_

_The boy had family in the beast’s stomping grounds, and thus pled with the Swordsman to go. The Tsibeyan wilds sat thankfully just above the northern village he had settled in for the night. With his pious protector’s spirit he found his steed and rode further north through the dusk._

_Now in his teen-hood the Swordsman had sworn the vow of Sankta Diyana and was bound to be chaste for life. To desire in the oath of Diyana would be blasphemy; to act would be sacrilegious. Never since had he bent his vow._

_He reached the first Tsibeyan town near midnight. There in an inn the young innkeeper told him the beast lurked in the next town over. So he took up his reins again and rode to the next._

_It was near witching hour when he reached the second town. There in front of a brothel a woman told him the beast lurked in the next town over. So he took up his reins yet again and rode to the next._

_The sun had touched the horizon by the time the third town came into view. There beside a fountain at dawn a tall, willowy woman sat playing a nadi, a wooden flute, to her flock of sheep. She heard the sound of hooves on the town square and looked up. At this moment the Swordsman was so deeply shaken by her beauty that he fell from his mount onto the ground._

_But the Swordsman did not rejoice in it. In his eyes, he had in that moment broken his most sacred and esteemed oath. So he bid the maiden avert her gaze and when she did he unsheathed the sword at his hip and pierced himself through the heart. All around the town the dogs bayed as if they knew tragedy, and the maiden knelt to cradle the dying Swordsman as he bled._

It was not the first time Kuwei Yul-Bo had seen a dead body, and it would not be the last.

He doubted it was Jin’s first either; nevertheless the pair of them stood, horrified, on the threshold of the spare room looking down at the red mess crawling into the soles of their shoes—Kuwei’s boots (alright), Jin’s white-peach-fuzzy bedroom slippers (disastrous)—and of course, the body, facedown and anonymous on the uncarpeted marble.

It was like a scene out of a play, a crime tragicomic they’d put on in the Barrel with either a very convincing actor or a corpse off the Reaper’s Barge. But this was real. The door they’d unlocked from the outside had pushed against an unknown obstacle when Jin had opened it. Now the ghastly interior of the room was laid bare for her and Kuwei to see. The thing that had yielded against the force of the door was a person, dead.

One of their arms was outstretched, hand slick with blood as if it’d slipped off the handle of the door as they’d clawed to escape. Something sharply sterling jutted from their back, a foreign, vicious vertebra, and for a second Kuwei thought they’d been stabbed just there before he realised: it was the tail end of the knife, emerging on the other side of its point of origin. His stomach turned a riot.

Jin started forward, to Kuwei’s disbelief. “What are you doing?”

Her face was a picture of grim nausea. “I need to check—“

“Check what?” He was too astonished to be embarrassed at how high his voice had gotten.

“Who it is!” she snapped. He felt foolish; it was obvious, albeit grotesque. As deliberate as a surgeon she dropped to a crouch beside the corpse. He realised what she intended to do and cringed again.

“Don’t tou—“ It was too late. She reached for where the cheek of the corpse met the pool of blood on marble and Kuwei saw the shudder of visceral disgust go through her like an electric shock, before carefully, slowly, she tilted their face to her. Dead eyes shut tight in prayer or pain. The blood made it almost impossible to discern the rest of their features from where he was standing, but Kuwei heard Jin’s sharp intake of breath and she rose as if she’d been struck, stumbling back from the body and into Kuwei.

He felt her sob before he heard it. She turned and flung her arms around him, the low cry shaking through her and through Kuwei. The crime scene that had previously seemed more vivid than anything dimmed to a dream of red and blue and the weight of Jin’s grief as she cried. He thought maybe he saw the body move, an eyelid flutter, the slow rise of a breath taken. Then there was the sound of footsteps in the distance that told of help, and when Kuwei looked again the body was still, face painfully, suddenly, familiar.


	2. Chapter 2

MONTHS PRIOR.

“Late Wednesday evening you had dinner in the grand hall,” said Zoya Nazyalensky. “Corroborated by multiple accounts of Grisha who were in said hall at said time.”

Kuwei Yul-Bo slid further down into the heavy wooden chair he was slumped in and tried not to evaporate under Zoya’s caustic glare.

“At 9p.m. you told Lyalya Lusovich you were ‘hitting the grass early.’” Zoya made air quotes around the phrase with two vicious quirks of her fingers. “This, you may find, was both a lie and a gross misuse of idiom.” If not for the fact that they were alone and that the empty Little Palace classroom was very much unlike a Fjerdan court of law, Kuwei might have felt as if he was on biased trial for witchcraft and about to be burned at the stake, the single pitch-haired member of the jury rattling off one by one his actions in a meandering road to his crime.

“It’s wordplay,” Kuwei countered weakly. “I did hit the grass. In a sense.”

“It’s taking me every ounce of my willpower right now not to hurl you out the window and have you publicly flogged,” she hissed. “Did you know that by a mere 9:15 several of the patrolling Grand Palace guards reported smelling smoke? Did you know that by 9:20 every bastard and their mother down in Novokribirsk could probably see Os Alta half on fire? Does this sound familiar to you?”

“It was, like, six trees!” It had not been six trees. That day when his handiwork had been done, he’d run south out of the woods and climbed the watchtower where a napping guard had woken from the thick tang of inferno and from Kuwei hurtling up the ladder for a better glimpse of the fire, a dust-smear of cinder down the left side of Kuwei’s nose and his flint and steel tucked safely in the inner lining of his kefta. The view was good.

The guard, as he trundled to consciousness: “What in the blazes of Yang—”

“Aha, good one,” he’d said in reply, and narrowly avoided being thrown off the platform and onto the ground below.

He’d thought Zoya might’ve been a little amused upon her return to Os Alta. She was not amused. She was probably about to strangle him with the sash of her blue Squaller kefta. Kuwei figured it wasn’t the worst way to go.

“I have approximately no fondness for anything royal in this country, royal forest even less,” Zoya said. “But this, Yul-Bo, is an embarrassment.”

Kuwei lifted his chin, affronted. “Funny.”

“There is nothing funny about this situation.”

“I don’t know a Yul-Bo.”

She made for the collar of his shirt, presumably to commence her strangulation of him. Kuwei dodged her hand and rolled out of the chair. They scuffled, Zoya trying to grab hold of him and Kuwei evading her. She released a creative-sounding string of obscenities in Ravkan that Kuwei’s vocabulary was too shallow to fully parse as they clashed.

“Truce? Truce?” he pled once she had him by the shoelace tie of his shirt.

“I’ll give you a damned truce,” she said, releasing him. “Tomorrow morning and the rest of the month you won’t be training with the Etherealki. You’ll be in the lab again, slogging your brains out for our cure.” The smug note in her voice made it clear that this was a punishment she’d come up with beforehand. Kuwei’s heart sank.

“This is a low blow.” The weeks he spent picking apart jurda stalks and crushing them with a mortar and pestle alongside a host of scientific geniuses had, needless to say, not been fun. By the second week he’d been driven nearly mad. By the start of the third he was begging the Triumvirate to absolve him from the research. Now he spent his mornings in the buttery sunlight of the courtyard, sparring or practicing with fire.

Zoya eyed him dispassionately. “This is your warning. The next time you burn something up I will personally ship you back to Fjerda.”

“Zoya,” Kuwei began. “I’ll do your paperwork for you. I’ll make your bed. You will never have to wait for your baths to warm. Ever again.”

“I would sooner trust a horse with my paperwork than you.”

Kuwei switched flanks. “Please?” he said, furrowing his tailored eyebrows. “I’m growing potential. I need time to train to improve.” Very gradually, his lower lip began to tremble.

She narrowed her eyes at him, unconvinced. “You are disgusting.”

Exasperated, he dropped the act. “I’m gonna give the Materialki the slip at the very first opportunity I get,” he threatened. “I’ll burn your room to the ground, so say goodbye to every single sordid love letter you’ve written the king.”

Zoya studied her nails. “The only person I’m writing sordid love letters to is your mother.” Kuwei, internally, pondered the impossibility of her crudeness. “And don’t bother trying. I’ve assigned a Materialnik to watch you during lab hours.” At that, Kuwei’s mouth drifted open slightly.

“A babysitter?” he said, voice spiking with further betrayal.

She smiled, a vulpine one with the barest hint of white teeth. Kuwei was nearly entirely certain that Zoya had entrusted him to the Devil. “You’re going to be the best of friends.”

She released him with little other fuss. When he opened the door Maxim and Matvei Ilyushin stumbled back in the damning manner that told Kuwei they’d both been eavesdropping, ears pressed flushed to the wood.

The three of them regarded each other silently for a second as Kuwei shut the door with his heel. Then the corner of Maxim’s mouth twitched and suddenly he was howling with laughter, so loud that there was no way Zoya couldn’t hear him from inside the room. He shook with it, bent double. Matvei cuffed him hard on the head to get him to stop.

“This is priceless,” Maxim said in between gasps for air. “Trust you, Mr Yul-Gal, to let yourself be caught and tried for arson. Excellent work on your part.”

Kuwei delivered a not-so-soft kick into his leg. “Some talk from the man who bet me I wouldn’t.”

“Fuck!” Maxim bent again, this time to cradle his ankle where Kuwei had kicked it. “Saints, Nhaban, my shin!” he caterwauled, then reconsidered: “My Ilyu-shin.” Matvei cuffed the back of his brother’s head again.

“We need to get to class,” said Kuwei sourly. “You know Zoya put me back in the lab? For a good month?”

“Shame,” Matvei said. “I’ll go in your place. Nobody will know.” It was a dead horse the Ilyushin twins would not stop beating; the very first day Kuwei had met them, the routine went something like this: they were seated, shoulder-to-shoulder, at the very back of the class, arms crossed across their chests in a quizzical imitation of each other. They’d even popped the collars of their blue-golden keftas in the same style. Kuwei had never seen a pair of twins so eerily similar, carbon copies of both ruddy countenance and manner. Naturally, he dropped his satchel and folded his kefta into his lap and took a shot in the dark to sit by them.

“That girl by the window mistook me for her friend this morning,” he’d whispered to them halfway through the conversation (mainly, gossip) they’d struck up in favour of paying attention to their biology class.

“That’s offensive,” Maxim said hotly. “It’s not like all Shu people look exactly the same.” Right on cue he and Matvei both looked to each other and as if seeing the twin who shared their face for the first time, let out equally horrified, equally startled “Ah!”s with a precision that suggested that it was not the first time they had pulled this gag. From the front of the class several people turned to look at the three of them.

But Kuwei and the Ilyushins, though all Shu, were worlds apart. The twins had the lightness of hair, the paint-spatter moles of the race of Shu that lived in the Sikurzoi, cheekbones high as the altitude. They were also, unfortunately, taller than Kuwei. According to Matvei, the Sikuri steppe had grown sick of making new children and made the same boy twice.

“Ha ha,” said Kuwei in reply to Matvei’s offer. “Sascha can spot you the hair dye.”

“Sascha cannot spot me the hair dye. Her hair is ‘natural’.” Matvei made air quotes around the word. “Anyway, why would she have black if she does her hair in white?”

“I was thinking she would have a collection.”

“In this economy?”

“Ha ha again.” Kuwei quickened his brisk pace. “Come on, Petyaev already hates me by association with the two of you. I can’t be late to his class. Again.”

“Just say Zoya wanted to see you and he’ll swoon into his poster of the respiratory system.”

“Oh, Mr Yul-Gal, I had no idea you were such a lady-killer, please feel free to be late to my class whenever you want,” said Maxim in an uncannily-accurate Petyaev tenor.

Kuwei was just a shade impressed. “Have you considered doing Komedie Brute?”

“Do you really think I’m that bad?”

They took the spiral staircase up two steps at a time. The wall beside had recently been hung with a copious number of serene Saint likenesses, including an oil of Sankt Grigori with his hands tied that was very curiously homoerotic. Maxim had since claimed this painting as his dear friend. “Looking good today, Grishka my man,” he chimed in as they passed by. The painting was unfazed.

When they got to the third-floor classroom there was someone else dithering outside. “Are we late?” Kuwei asked anxiously, and they turned to face him. “...You’re new?”

The Suli boy shifted his tote bag on his shoulder. “Um. Yeah. And no, the professor’s not in yet, I just…” His eyes, round and dark, fixed themselves seriously on a point somewhere above Kuwei’s shoulder.

Kuwei’d seen him before, but a name eluded him— “Hey, aren’t you in my Ancient History class?”

The boy nodded shortly and gravely. Neither said anything. Pathetically Kuwei prayed for one of the twins to save him.

Matvei did. “Wasn’t the deadline for swapping classes last week?”

“Oh, I’m not swapping, I’m taking it supplementary.”

“Big boy, huh, Mr Riyad?” Maxim jibed. “Five classes too painless for you?”

A furrow twitched between the boy’s eyebrows. “Your mother was too painless for me last night, Ilyushin.” It was the second jab of this variety Kuwei had heard in the past ten minutes.

“Cheap shot.”

“Your m—”

“I get it.”

The twins led the way into the classroom and Kuwei, slightly annoyed, wondered if they knew every single Grisha in the Little Palace. His effort to catch up had fallen through. “Who was that?”

“Sami Riyad. He’s old Nazyalenskaya’s mini-me.” (Both Ilyushins seemed to be deathly allergic to using other people’s proper names or surnames.) “Brat pack’s Squaller.”

“Brat pack?”

“You have to see them to get it.”

Kuwei was used to being the odd one out in a group of people who knew each other like they knew breathing; he’d done it in Ketterdam with the gang of madmen who’d saved him from the Ice Court. The feeling he got from this recurring fate, though tiresome, was familiar. It felt like every other Grisha here had met each other’s parents or seen the rise and fall of empires together. It felt like every eye and every laugh would gloss over him on its way to someone more significant.

But the feeling dissipated as soon as Maxim threw a lazy arm around his neck, steered him in the direction of the back of the class where they always sat in an inattentive folie à trois. Matvei pulled a chair over for him and Kuwei collapsed into it, eagerly, feeling not for the first time in the past month, that small, indomitable burning of belonging.

By the time the class was over, he’d very nearly forgotten where he would be the next morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shu Han, though linked by a common language known mainly as Plain Shu (in some instances, Plains, for the flatlands, as compared the the elevated Sikurzoi) is also host to a variety of dialects. Most of these dialects do not stray very far from the original Shu language, often sharing some pronunciations and turns of phrase. Fluent  
> speakers of Plain Shu are likely not to understand such dialects, however, dialect speakers often are also fluent in Plain Shu. Exceptions may include nomads of rural regions, where Plain Shu is not commonly used to communicate.
> 
> One of the more prominent examples of a Shu dialect would be the Sikuri language, spoken by the race of Shu who live in the Sikurzoi, along the Ravkan border of Shu Han. South Shu regions, too, have a myriad of such languages, though these Southern dialects are often concentrated within isolated clans or small provinces.


	3. Chapter 3

Ty Souyinka fell in casual step beside his best friend and said, “What are you smiling about?”

Sami’s eyebrows came down, but the smile stayed dreamily on his face as he walked, books in his arm like he’d forgotten he had a bag on his shoulder. “Am I?”

“You so are.” Playfully Ty put his weight into a shoulder-check, sending Sami stumbling a few steps to the right. Sami righted himself and shoved him back in retaliation. “Woah, hey, leave it, you’re gonna drop your reading.” Ty paused his teasing to assist; on examination, the books Sami had been holding were some, if not all, volumes of epic poetry unrelated to intermediate biology.

“Thanks,” said Sami, opening his bag to let Ty keep his books for him. The glow hadn’t quite left his eyes, the corners of his mouth still quirked fondly.

“Seriously,” Ty prodded. “You get a gold star for your essay on, I dunno, eyelash genetics?”

“I did not,” Sami replied crossly. “I was just—there was—do you read Suli legend?”

“Do I what?” The question had come so far out of left field that Ty thought he’d misheard.

“Or did you hear the stories growing up. You know, the Swordsman? And the Dark Pine Forest? Swordsman and the Lost City of Sand? Swordsman and the Were-Hyena?”

“I’ve heard the one with the hyena, but I thought it was a Zemeni myth.”

“That’s because it is,” Sami’s voice had taken on the near reverent tone that he usually reserved for gushing about Zoya Nazyalensky. “And a Suli one. ‘Cause Suli stories overlap a bit with the folklore of other countries. Y’know, if you’re moving constantly, you have to keep a strong oral tradition, so a lot of the overlap stories are borrowed and rebuilt over centuries, or they’re stories rooted in Suli culture and adapted by other countries, causing an overlap—anyway that’s not the point.”

Ty, mystified, wondered what exactly could be the point.

“Have you heard the story with the vampire? The Swordsman and the Blood-Beast.”

“I don’t think I have. Indulge me?’

“I swear this will make sense in a bit.” Sami began the story and told it in a rushed sketch of tavern and troth. The conclusion came quicker than in the folk tales Ty was used to. "So then right when the man is bleeding into the dust, I picture it goes kinda like this: if you were watching it happen from across the street out your window, she'd look up from the corpse and stare you right in the eye and you'd, like, know," Sami finished his spiel breathlessly. It was rare that Sami Riyad talked as fast as he walked; this evening seemed to be, for whatever reason, the exception.

"Know?" prompted Ty as they passed through a slanted rectangle of orange sunlight cast through a glassless window.

"Wait, I'm not done, do you remember that blood-monster that the Swordsman went down to town to kill? She's it. By killing himself he feeds her. Yes, she's his downfall, but not passively like—"

“Oh shit,” Ty raised his eyebrows. "Wait, you’re saying he was so horny for a monster that he died?"

Sami's mouth opened and shut. "He did other things too!"

“I mean, yeah, but it doesn’t cancel out!”

"Whatever. The Swordsman doesn't die," Sami explained, vexed. "He always comes back, somehow."

"Just like my existential dread?"

"I was thinking more like a firebird."

"That's more poetic. You know, he was a knight in my ma's versions."

"He was not."

"I think you're a higher authority on Suli folk tales than she is." They took a sharp right past the classrooms and into the stairwell. "So what about the Swordsman?”

"The point is." Very quickly Sami's face had grown quite pink. "Is..." Between them a silence stretched until something clicked in Ty's head.

"Ohhh," he said, pleasantly surprised. "Oh, Sami, you drama king. You’re in love?”

"Shut up," said Sami in a characteristic burst of self-consciousness. "It was just a thought."

"A very dramatic thought. That pretty, huh? A regular Yeva Luchova?" The duke of Velisyana's overwhelmingly lovely daughter, stolen by the river. Ravka’s folklore seemed populated by stories of gorgeous women.

The two of them passed a Sankt Grigori likeness hung on the wall in more ways than one before Sami spoke again. "I thought my heart would stop if I looked too long."

“Ha! Your own personal blood-sucker.” Ty was even quicker to catch on to the rest of it. "So you're taking biology now," he started, "because she does bio and you want to see her more! Shit, that’s basically the equivalent of falling on your own sword.”

Sami winced and started, "It's—" before he cut himself off and stuck his lower lip out in consternation. "Nah. I mean the class is a breeze for me and maybe it'll be interesting so it's not like I'm doing it for...her? It's just that it's a bonus is what I'm saying."

"Next week you'll be writing your wedding vows."

To speak of the devil and of Ravkan beauty queens, in the foyer leading to the domed dining hall was the human equivalent of a thunderstorm. Zoya's presence had resulted in the loitering of several starry-eyed cliques of Grisha, and she looked incensed at the injustice of having waited longer than a minute for them to turn up. She'd been leaning rather suavely on a column, and when she saw Sami emerge, she straightened and produced a waxy envelope from within her kefta.

"Sergei," she barked. Sami's prior look of consternation resurfaced in earnest. "I need you to carry this to Nijmeyer when he's back from Kerch."

"He's returned, General. I think the day before yesterday," Sami informed her dutifully.

"Then bring it to him now," she amended her order. "I'll be away, so try not to go soft. On the days of your individual sessions, you'll train with the other Etherealki."

Sami turned the envelope over to examine the blue wax seal of the Triumvirate. "What is this?"

"The new Etherealki training plan. Ask me another unnecessary question and see what happens." Zoya's disdain for the Little Palace Grisha seemed to extend to Sami, despite his supposed position as her young Squaller prodigy.

"Sorry, General. I'll get it to Nijmeyer by tonight." Abashed, Sami tucked the letter into the inner pocket of his kefta and nodded to Zoya solemnly.

At that, she flicked her hair over a shoulder and turned to leave, but stopped as if to think. "One last thing," she said, and paused to give them time to shift uneasily in the tenuous silence. "Ty. The Inferni should be back in the lab tomorrow. Do what I told you to do—he’s on the second floor, the third last room—you’ll probably have to hunt him down at gunpoint to make him show up, just for your information.”

Ty started a response, but she turned away, satisfied, and left them. “Why is an Inferni working with Fabrikators?” Sami asked Ty under his breath.

“I have no idea.” The request to watch the Etherealnik boy had first come from David Kostyk—something about a troublemaker. Ty put the matter out of his mind and nudged Sami with his elbow. "Sergei?"

"Do I look like a Sergei?" asked Sami, exasperated. "I hate to think that I do."

"Saints, no. I wouldn't be friends with someone who looked like a Sergei," Ty jibed. "Anyway, step lively. There's dinner to be eaten."

In the dining room, the last of the evening light from the high domed skylight was quickly leaving. The hour was blue. Ty scanned the crowd around the long banquet tables and found Jin easily; she was surrounded neatly by a gaggle of Corporalki like sentient rose bushes in their keftas.

The rest of the Grisha were either clustered in their respective cliques or trickling in so as to cluster in their respective cliques. The food was good—the Dark civil war had come and gone, and clearly, someone in charge valued the importance of edible cooking and invested sufficient Ravkan rublehya into ensuring no Grisha died of voluntary malnutrition before they could fight the next. The desserts that had once been but wishful thinking piled high and sugary on glass platters; Ty would have braved any underworld, tundra, or permafrost for a slice of sponge cake. Luckily, he didn't have to. The only thing he had to brave were the Ilyushin twins, stacking a Mandala roof of fried dough on a single plate they'd obtained from the buffet.

"Excuse me," he tried. "You're in the way of the soufflés."

One of the twins (Ty had never figured out how to distinguish them) looked up and opened his mouth like he was about to say something, but his twin sent him a look that could wither jurda in the field. Very softly he said, "The souffway," before the pair of them crashed back into the crowd with their still-intact tower.

Plate of vanilla soufflé in hand, Ty made his way to the Corporalki table. Jin spotted him out of the corner of her eye but still acted graciously surprised as he placed the plate before her and kissed her perfunctorily on the cheek. The Corporalki made no move to make space for him to join them, and he withdrew to find Sami in the crowd.

When the noise and the laughter had waned, Ty said his goodnights and started on his way. The rest of the Grisha would be stealing away to the training rooms, or to quarters not their own, or just to bed, depending on the degree and nature of their wildness. Ty was a touch embarrassed at the sheer nerdiness of his destination. The carved yellow birds on the door to the Fabrikator workshop seemed to agree. The workshop was dark, lit only by the few stars through the high windows, looking out into the black night. He swore as he peered into the deep silence of the unlit lab. He’d seen the Shadow Fold once and only once before, along his desperate tour across the country to the capital. Years later he still remembered the way it had seeped, like some eldritch variety of black ink, into what felt like the center of every bone in his body. Even now that it was but sand and superstition he still prickled at the weight of ordinary darkness and all the teeth it could hide.

He strode into the workshop and hoped he remembered accurately the position of the switches he needed to find. A minute of fumbling yielded nothing, with his bad eyesight worse in near pitch darkness. He thought he heard something like one of the nocturnal corn snakes in its giant terrarium bonking its head against the glass, and the hair at the back of his neck prickled at the soft sound. He cursed himself, cursed his nerves for being irrational, mad by the dark. Nevertheless, he turned to confront the emptiness of the lab. He waited, squinting. Nothing.

Something else moved in the stillness. It was unmistakable, and Ty’s heart jumped like it’d been struck. With one hand he slammed the wall where he remembered the light switch was—it took two tries, and the lab flooded with artificial light. Everything was motionless, dried jurda blossoms a judgmental orange where the Alkemi had left them during the day, the odd plants in their terrariums stagnant, stolid.

Everyone who’s lived in this country long enough is scared of the dark, he thought to comfort himself. A shiver passed through him, but he had little patience to dwell on it. He found his table and got back to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol jin’s name was previously jadyn but i changed it because of the sheer babynames.com vibe it had


	4. Chapter 4

The Fabrikator workshops were far from the unyielding ice of Fjerdan laboratories or the cells of staring volunteers of Shu Han, but for the brief period of time Kuwei had worked on the cure alongside the Materialki it had started to feel distressingly similar. The very last evening he’d worked in the lab, the voices of the Alkemi puzzling over jurda stem and xylem had all of a sudden glazed like permafrost into a language he barely understood, vowels sung like cold water over rock. When he reached for the wall to steady his swimming nerves, the frost of it bit hard into his palm. Somewhere outside, far off, he heard the distant weeping of a woman, the gut-empty drug-want of an addict in withdrawal that he’d come to know. It was the world turned on its head. It was his life, flung back months into the Ice Court he’d thought he would never leave. 

Then a Materialnik pipetting liquid jurda into a test tube had begun to laugh at a joke someone else had told, warm and delighted enough to melt ice. Kuwei shuddered out of the hallucination like a sleeper from the freezing depths of a bad dream. The lab dissolved into truth; the Fabrikators spoke rough Ravkan, the walls were painted a pretty warm shade of coffee, there was no woman crying for another dose of parem. There was only him, wide-eyed and mid-meltdown in the safest place he could be in the entirety of the continent. Apart from the snakes in the large glass terrariums. 

“Nhaban?” said Leoni, her hand halfway to his face where she’d been waving it in front of his eyes. He looked to her frantically. The corners of her mouth quirked. “I called you three times.” 

“Sorry,” he surveyed the beakers and blossoms she had laid out on the workspace. “Yeah, no, I think I’m done here, actually.” That night after dinner he’d caught Zoya and told her, _Never will I be returning to that place after today._

Now it was morning, and someone was knocking very insistently on his bedroom door. Kuwei rolled over in bed and pulled his duvet over his ears to drown the noise out—it went on for what felt like an eternity until his tormentor ceased—but soon after that there was a metallic click and the door, which he swore on his life he’d locked the previous night, swung open.

The knocker entered and Kuwei did his best feign sleep. To their credit, they’d dithered apologetically in the doorway before doing so, as if a touch embarrassed. Then there was a rudely radiant blaze of light, the inside of Kuwei’s eyelids colouring red. The sound of protest he made gave him away. 

Once he’d rubbed the brightness away, he sat up and gave the trespasser his best glare. A boy about his age draped in the wine-shade of a Fabrikator kefta stood by the window, hand on the cord for the blinds. He stared at Kuwei through silver spectacle frames. 

“You’ve missed breakfast,” he said in lieu of any pleasantries. He sounded appropriately sheepish.

“Why are you in my room?”

“I’m here to make sure you don’t miss lab as well.” He seemed to remember his manners, though a bit late, and strode to the side of Kuwei’s bed to offer his hand. “I’m Ty Souyinka. Pardon the intrusion, but in my defense, I knocked for maybe a century.” 

Kuwei goggled at it for a good few seconds before pointedly ignoring it. “Nhaban Yul-Gal.” He stretched and slid out of bed past Ty.

Bemused, Ty kept his hand and watched Kuwei dig through his closet. “Do you not shake where you’re from?”

Kuwei poked his head out from between his blue keftas to shoot back, “Do you often break into strangers’ bedrooms to wake them up rather impolitely where _you’re_ from?” and nearly instantly regretted. It was a rather inelegant comeback; both of them seemed to know it. Anyway, it was his first conversation with the person he assumed was his Materialnik babysitter, and already he’d been knocked off his high road. Next thing he knew, he thought glumly, they’d be trading blows in a ditch in the courtyard.

He pulled his summer kefta from the closet and considered his current ensemble. He’d slept in it, but it was passable; he just needed pants. Ty looked politely away while Kuwei selected a pair and stepped into them as modestly as he could manage.

Part of him regretted having missed breakfast —the domed hall where the Grisha ate was maybe his favourite place in all of the Little Palace (coupled with the fact that it was one of the few rooms he knew how to find). It was a Wednesday, so there would have been bird’s milk cake or sweet white pounded rice balls from the kitchens, he realised, and the realisation made him even more bad-tempered. It was not the first time he had slept through the Wednesday morning treats. A glimpse of powdered sugar down the front of Ty’s trousers blackened his caliginous mood further.

Ty led him through a series of twists and staircases until they materialised on one side of the workshop. Through the window, Kuwei caught sight of the interior, cast in natural light, the Fabrikators toiling away within. He was more interested in his reflection. To boost his mood, he surveyed his own borrowed face in the glass. Experimentally he raised an eyebrow. He did that a lot as of late—it made him quite fetchingly appraising. Genya’s work was such that every glance in a reflective surface made Kuwei think coyly to himself, who is that gorgeous bastard?

They turned the corner and met with the door to the lab. “We’re here,” announced Ty redundantly; Kuwei wondered where he was from. His Ravkan had the lyrical rises, the affected, pleasantly artificial tone of a language learned verb-by-verb, saying-by-saying. It was a nowhere accent. 

“Do you think it’s too late to make a gingerbread boy version of myself and send it in my place?”

Ty didn’t respond. He moved past Kuwei to the door of the Materialki lab, narrowly missing a full-on shoulder check. The handles inlaid in the pale wood were wrought like a pair of hands turned skyward in supplication. Sourly Kuwei followed, frowning at the back of Ty’s impressively curly head.

Inside the labs they found David easily, and Ty took a moment to sweep a small hill of crushed papers off his desk into a waste-basket below. “Genya was asking for you,” he told David so gently that Kuwei felt like he was intruding on some sort of sacred bonding moment.

They made a turn past the Durast station and to where the Alkemi sat at work, talking in low voices over orange flowers spread out on thin white paper, beakers full of jewel-tones of chemicals, the brick-tang of liquefied jurda sitting stagnant in test tubes. The lab was tediously familiar. On the far side of it was a portrait of Nikolai Lantsov that took up most of the wall. It was Kuwei’s only solace in a sombre place.

One of the Fabrikators spotted him and waved him over. “I thought you quit?” 

“Zoya sent me back,” he told her mournfully. The seat beside her was empty, so he pulled a stool out and sat. 

“For your forest stunt?” the Fabrikator, Sascha, asked, bemused. “How much did Maxim pay you for that?”

Kuwei’s fingers danced with numbers as he recalled. “Fifteen rublehya?”

She threw her white head back and laughed with abandon. Sascha was a Durast, technically, and so was Ty—the silvered embroidery in their Materialki purple the indicator. But now that the perfect cure for parem was just within reach, it was all hands on deck, the herb-scent of jurda stalks a permanent fixture, the Durasts flitting between the two areas of the lab like frantic damselflies. Though Sascha, with her broad shoulders and solid poise and short hair the colour of an active geyser, would never have struck Kuwei as a Durast. 

Ty took a seat beside them, amicably watchful, a meerkat off-duty. “It was you who started the fire?” He paused and added, “For fifteen rublehya?”

“I’d have done it for free.” 

“I heard a minister was caught in the blaze.”

“Ah. I suppose that’s true.”

“You suppose?”

“I mean, I didn’t see him. It was alleged.” Still Kuwei held a small, secret smudge of pride for having (allegedly) singed the coattails of someone important. He wondered if a lawsuit was in order. He wondered if Zoya would take care of it, or leave him to the dogs and gloat. 

They moved on to less exciting things. Kuwei had known it was inevitable and still wished that they would take a recess from the science to engage in something that didn’t bore him to sleep or to tears. He thought that he quite preferred even being a corpse in Reaper’s Barge to whatever trivial jurda lore they discussed in the name of research. Silently he bade someone sneak up on him from behind and knock him unconscious with a tray of test tubes. No one came.

By the sixth jurda stalk, he felt ready to scream. He set his chopping knife down on the board. He’d left ungraceful long divots in the board where the knife had travelled too far past the stalk of the plant and acquainted itself with the wood. Wordlessly, Kuwei stood.

“Where are you going?” asked Ty. His tone was very carefully cavalier. 

“The men’s,” Kuwei replied. “As we all must from time to time.”

Ty looked as if he was entirely exhausted with the situation. To Kuwei’s chagrin, he too stood and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’m to accompany you.”

Kuwei feigned offense. “You think I’m using this as an excuse to escape my duties?” _Fuck_ , he thought to himself. It was completely an excuse to escape his duties. _Shit._

They walked in silence, Ty pensive, Kuwei seething. Zoya was probably somewhere having kvas with the minister he’d set on fire. He wished darkly that it was decorous to wring the neck of a Second Army general. He considered becoming a Ravkan legislator instead of a Grisha soldier so that he could make it an addition to the country’s constitution. 

The restroom that Ty brought him to wasn’t the outdoor sort near the banya that Kuwei had been hoping for. Bitterly he shut himself into a cubicle and weighed his options. Climbing over the wall of the stall and running into the woods was out of the question; the walls rose very neatly into a frescoed ceiling. Returning to the workshop after pretending to finish his business was unideal. He frowned, deep in thought. Underneath the door he could see Ty’s shoes. 

The boredom made him reckless. “Hey, Ty.”

“Hmm?”

“Your shoes are on fire,” he said. He swept his flint from his pocket and struck it in one swift action. His concentration had improved since Ketterdam, and that was the crux of the Small Science, that focus. He could never seem to summon that same focus for equations or lectures but with fire, it came more easily. Flame bloomed like a miracle in the space he could see below the door. Ty yelped in horrified surprise. 

Quickly Kuwei unlatched the door of his cubicle. He wasted no time. Ducking past Ty, he hurtled out of the restroom with wicked glee. Behind him he could hear vicious swearing in a language not Ravkan. The exit opened up into the hallway they’d walked through, and Kuwei, still unfamiliar with the Little Palace, dove through a pair of double doors. The library beyond them was vaguely familiar and quite breathtaking, the domed glass ceiling sending bolts of late morning light down onto wooden platforms and tables and yellowing volumes already speckled with foxing.

He could hear Ty fast approaching behind him. Maybe Kuwei had, in fact, lost his mind. He turned and cupped his hands around his mouth to shout while running, “Careful, Souyinka, the shelves here are full of flammable things!” 

On cue, a single brown patent leather shoe in the Kerch style came hurtling into the library. It splashed against the wood floor and stopped short far from Kuwei; he guessed that Ty had doused it in water from the sink to put it out. He ducked past a row of shelves just as Ty emerged.

The interior of the library was ringed with a balcony that circled the second floor. If he’d been a different man, perhaps one with a limp and a crow’s head cane, he would probably had considered the consequences of his mayhem before he’d carried it out. It was too late for that now. Instead, he drew his strength from someone else entirely and launched himself onto a high table meant for comprehending scholarly texts or something else more pious than subpar acrobatics. 

The table was backed up to another bookshelf, and Kuwei hurriedly relieved its topmost story of books before placing one foot into the empty space and vaulting up to seize the railing of the balcony with one hand. It was a near thing. Once he’d lifted himself shakily up and swung a leg over the railing, he stood on the balcony and planted two hands on his hips.

Ty had retrieved the shoe he’d flung and dangled his pair of oxfords in his hand, a finger in each shoe’s heel. On the first story of the library, standing only in his high woollen socks, Kuwei thought Ty looked like he was about to pass out from anger, eyebrows drawn down in displeasure almost comic in its potency. He thought Ty was quite liable to try again with his shoe. 

“Don’t die of apoplexy before Zoya can flay you,” Kuwei called from the safety of the second story. Ty, far more successful in taking the high road, did not dignify his taunt with an answer.

-

The Etherealki’s morning training by the lake was winding down by the time Kuwei reached it, out of breath. He was pleasantly surprised to find Ty not on his tail when he left the Little Palace to trek down to the idyllic lakeside spot where the young order of elements trained. He imagined that Zoya would give the Fabrikator an earful equal to that which she would give Kuwei for skipping his very first day of scientific incarceration. If the man who leaves his cell is guilty, guiltier is the man who lets him leave, he thought, repeating to himself an aphorism he may have heard Tolya spout recently. 

Summer had come knocking in earnest, harder and quicker than anyone had anticipated. Ravka was sluggish with heat so punishing it might almost melt permafrost. Kuwei had no complaints, suited to the warmer clime as he was. It made for prettier days on the bank of the cerulean lake, made his fire surer in the palms of his hands. 

Matvei, sprawled in the grass under a tree, inclined his head just the slightest as Kuwei arrived. Despite the heat, he was still in his kefta (to see an Ilyushin without his kefta was akin to seeing somebody else naked.) He was amusing himself by chasing away the shade with a clever rerouting of sunlight, then letting the shade fall again as he dismissed it. “I thought ye storm witch of old banished you to the glassy confines of the kingdom of Fabrikator workshop?” Kuwei took care not to look too long at the speckle over his eyebrow, the aimless constellation of his face. Detachedly he wondered if mole patterns were the same between identical twins.

“Hail and well met to you, too, fucking Anatolyevich of Hachinsk.” Kuwei noted the little jewel in Matvei’s left ear—it was an arbitrary thing the twins had decided upon, a pair of gleaming studs they split between them as an identifier. An earring on the left meant Matvei, the right meant Maxim. Considering that the twins were like identical socks in their interchangeability, it was a useful trick. 

Matvei didn’t contest the jab. He blinked lazily at Kuwei and after a second, said, “What would it be called if Zoya Nazyalensky lived in a slum?” 

Kuwei rolled his eyes as theatrically as he could manage. “What?”

His face shone with self-satisfaction. “Squalor.”

In his twin’s absence, it seemed, Matvei could indulge in his own wordplay without being accused of hypocrisy. “Repeat that to any Squaller here and you’ll be flogged by the evening.”

“Oh no,” said Matvei, the mole above his eyebrow shifting as he scrunched up his face. “Don’t look now, but Nijmeyer is giving you the evil eye.” 

Kuwei looked. Nijmeyer, the Kerch-born Grisha who presided over their training on most days, was indeed giving him the evil eye. 

It was just Kuwei’s luck that Nijmeyer had come back from his leave a day or so early. “Nhaban,” came the order, and he had no choice but to drag his feet to see the mentor. “The General says you’ve been dismissed from morning exercises. She’s told me to send you back to the Fabrikators if I see you.” Even as he said it, Nijmeyer seemed skeptical—what use was an Inferni among the prodigy whelps? Kuwei saw his chance and pressed on.

“You’re mistaken, sir,” Kuwei did his best to look innocent. “I’m back in the lab...next week.” The falter did not look good on his part. “We agreed that I shouldn’t neglect my Ethereal gift when there are already so many smarter Grisha working on the cure.”

Nijmeyer considered this. “Today. Today you may stay. But I’m seeing her right after this to verify your claim.” 

Not believing his luck, Kuwei turned back to Matvei. Nijmeyer stopped him. “You need a partner for the exercise. Squaller.” He scanned the lakeside for a suitable loose end to attach to Kuwei and found one without much trouble. “Riyad. You’re with him.”

It was the Suli boy from the day before, the one in his Ancient History class. They exchanged a look and Kuwei thought he saw a flicker of protest in his eyes. Kuwei narrowed his own. “Sami, right?” 

Sami coughed. “Uh. Huh.” 

“Well, let’s start.” It was a simple enough thing, with Kuwei sparking clouds of flame and Sami sending them like projectiles over to the other bank of the lake, but by the fourth fireball Kuwei was breathing hard. Sami looked no different from when he’d started, despite the fact that he’d been carrying fire with his power as fast as bullets from the barrel of a gun. By then, the training was over, and the Etherealki dispersed for the riotous occasion of lunch. 

Matvei was gone before Kuwei—annoyed, he found himself alone with the exception of Sami, who, despite his talent, didn’t seem connected to any of the other Etherealki. They walked in silence, side by side. 

Overhead, the sun crested in the noon sky. Kuwei felt the salt-drip of sweat down his temple and longed for shade. He walked faster.


	5. Chapter 5

The year before had been a year of realising. Spirited from nation to nation, he’d had realisation after realisation so torrentially that on the other side of understanding he seemed permanently shifted off his axis. Like a tributary altered by a flood. Except he was never a river, never water—his father had said that Kuwei was a fire waiting to be set. But fire was fire, never changed, only there and gone. He thought, once, that would be him, there and dead before sixteen.

First, in the Ice Court, he’d realised he was going to die. It wasn’t when the witch-hunters first dragged him into a cell or when the government men executed their first interrogation, heavy boots on cold floors. Instead he’d been curled in a rope hammock with his father’s notebook open on his lap. It was weeks before they saved him. He turned a page of measurements and on the next there was a spot of red, a penny of blood not yet faded by time. Seeing it, the thought had come to him like a prophecy. You’re gonna die, and soon.

There is no easy way to confront your own death. When he was younger, he always imagined he would look right into its sleet-grey eyes, take it by its horns like every tragic hero did. Instead he’d slipped into it as quietly as silk. Just a syringe through his wrist and he was out like a light on the floor of the Church of Barter with Kaz Brekker bent over him in calculated concern. There was nothing in between, no god to greet him, just two separate lives spliced together at the center where he’d lost consciousness and where he’d regained it. Then there was electricity through every atrium and ventricle of his heart and he was back, gasping, like he’d woken from one nightmare into another, Zoya and Genya and Nina over him like a freakshow of Fates. If not for the gag in his mouth he would have bitten his tongue clean off in terror.

It scared him how unremarkable dying could be. Death wasn’t for confronting, he learned. Death wanted to blindside you. Death was for knifing you in a back alley so fast you couldn’t see its face to pick it out of a lineup, much less look it in the eye.

But later, ironically, in the corpse boat, with his eyes shut and hands by his side, he’d realised he was going to live. This was a new realisation for him. Still some nights when darkness became dreams became drüskelle, he un-realised it, easy as unravelling an old bandage. Underneath them the metaphorical wound smarted.

And somewhere in between the dramatic dying and living he’d had the ugliest realisation of all. Black Veil Island, in all its damp glory, lit with unearthly violet fire. Dime Lions shouting. Worst: Jesper’s face like a khitka’s in the low, nearly fluorescent light, the flick of his eyelashes as he winked. Kuwei’d never been very booksmart, but he wasn’t stupid either—he liked to think he had a good head on his shoulders. But boys with good heads on their shoulders didn’t fall in love in graves; boys with good heads on their shoulders didn’t fall in love with other boys. Still, the moment he realised he had, he’d wanted to shout it from every mountain-top in the Sikurzoi.

Maybe that made it the sweetest realisation of all. He wasn’t sure what to think of it, yet. He’d spent most of his pre-teen-hood chasing girls around the willow trees because everyone else did it, up until his first most earth-shattering realisation had come and his and his father’s lives were upturned and there was no more time to chase girls whose names he didn’t know.

Falling in love with Jesper, at the time, seemed as earth-shattering as realising he was Inferni. Not like lying on his back in a meadow or like feeling the heat of the immolating summer sun. More like sitting up and seeing the grass around him aflame in a Kuwei-shaped ring, burning idyllically like an unnatural fairy circle. It was like feeling horror and ecstasy in equal, punishing parts. Like knowing that somewhere there must have been a spark. A catalyst.

Except his life wasn’t interested in catalysts. His life was interested only in aftermaths, in realisation, in sweet, ugly, earth-shattering realisation.

Once he heard the muffled “Come in,” from behind the door, Kuwei slid the wide bamboo panel aside and stepped in. The owner of the voice was seated in a chair under a painting of a halcyon wild landscape, head thrown back to expose the hill of his neck, his adam’s apple. His hands were folded serenely in his lap. At first glance, he could’ve been anywhere from twenty to forty, anywhere between Shu and Suli and Ravkan.

His eyes were closed. “Back so soon, Aleksandra?” Kuwei wouldn’t have known, as he wasn’t Aleksandra. Unsure how to respond, he cleared his throat awkwardly instead. The man’s eyes flew open at once. The two of them watched each other in bewilderment for a second.

“Who are you?” the man demanded. He was draped in a knitted blanket that spilled over the sides of his chair and touched the wood of the floor just barely. His golden-brown eyes narrowed beneath a low brow.

“Nhaban?” Kuwei tried. “Yul-Gal. I’m assigned to be mentored…?”

The man’s perplexed expression cleared. “Oh! Oh, good.” He shifted almost painfully in his chair, and for the first time Kuwei noticed the orange shape curled like a question mark or a particularly small, broad anaconda at his feet. The cat lifted its tabby face to Kuwei. Unimpressed, it set its head back down. “You’re Inferni?”

“Yes?” Kuwei said, and then cursed himself for letting his pitch rise into uncertainty. What else would he be?

“Hm. Your name is...fitting. Was your father the same?”

Kuwei considered this. “I never knew my father. I chose Yul-Gal myself.” It was partially true.

“Oh, I like that. It’s rather poetic.” Nhaban Yul-Gal—Phoenix, Son of Fire—It was poetic. Ridiculously so. Perfect for a fake boy with a fake life. “Come, sit.”

There was no discernable other chair, so Kuwei sat cross-legged on the floor before the man. He was brought back to his childhood of learning basic mathematics from the blackboard while sitting similarly among a class of rowdy five-year-olds, though he was almost entirely sure that the man in front of him would not have him sing songs to remember the multiplication table. The jurda-shade tabby, unhappy with the new addition to its space, gave him the evil eye.

The man produced a lacquered wooden pipe and sat back. Kuwei had never before seen such a pipe in real life; only in picture books, held by the wise grandfather of a courageous protagonist. The only thing out of place was the man himself; hair not yet grey, looking more suited to kickboxing than introspection. He was not the grandfather; he was almost certainly the protagonist. The hand holding the pipe, Kuwei noticed, also bore a ring with a rough sliver of stone on the fourth finger. Wearily the man extended his pipe to Kuwei and said, “Spark me a light, would you, _haiyamau_?” He used the Shu word for tiger, and Kuwei felt an inexplicable warmth in the center of his chest.

He obliged the man, striking his flint and leaning in to hold his flickering thumb to the pipe. “Couldn’t you light up yourself?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” The Shu man took a heady pull of his pipe and billowed out a cloud. The thick scent was familiar—Kuwei’d been smelling it consistently in the lab—the sweet herbal bite of jurda stalks. Where the blossoms were stimulants, meant to keep you wise and alert through the small hours of the morning, the stalks were dampeners, to loosen your nerves or knock you out like a light, or, in some cases, to ease your chronic pain. From the way the man’s face unfolded itself in relief, Kuwei had a hunch it was the latter.

The person in charge of Kuwei’s schedule had neglected to disclose this new mentor’s name. On the sheet of paper he’d been issued, it said, perfunctorily, Inferni Learning. Some part of Kuwei thought that this man’s name might be so significant that knowledge of it would make him burst into flames and scatter away into ash.

The man said, “Did I introduce myself?“ He blinked once, twice, tried to recall. “You can call me Yul-Ko.” Kuwei did not burst into flames or scatter into ash.

Kuwei reached for the tabby and was rewarded with a hiss. “In the South, it’s improper to call a person by his father’s name.” He wasn’t sure what it was about the smoking man that compelled him to blurt out whatever ran through his mind, but he wished it hadn’t. He winced, but it was too late to bite his tongue.

Yul-Ko’s eyebrows rose further than Kuwei thought they were capable of rising. “It is no different in Central Shu Han, where I am from.” Kuwei hadn’t guessed that it was different. From the way Maxim Ilyushin never ceased calling Kuwei by his patronymic, one might have thought it was different in the Sikurzoi. It was not. Maxim just wasn’t much concerned with propriety. The Ilyushins would have been vulgar no matter what Shu region they hailed from. It was luck on their part that their family held no Shu naming conventions; Kuwei could not return the favour.

“Then why introduce yourself like that?”

“I don’t think you’re in any position to judge a man for his name, Nhaban Yul-Gal.” Kuwei’s cheeks coloured. He was well aware that his new identity had a name like a tragic hero fated to burn at the stake, or something equally dramatic. He was not proud of being chastised for this for the second time.

The tabby, who'd shrunk away from Kuwei’s placating hand, retreated into the safe harbour of the space behind Yul-Ko’s legs. Kuwei said, “I’m sorry. I was just wondering.”

“It’s no harm.” Yul-Ko took another hit and used his pipe to gesture to Kuwei. “Hey, let’s get this show on the road. I want to see what you can do.” He looked on expectantly—Kuwei, surprised, cast his eyes upwards away from where he’d been making hopeful puppy eyes at the orange cat.

“Now? What do I do?” he slipped his blue kefta off and piled it into a heap beside him; cracked his knuckles like he was about to brawl in a bar (a feat that was probably beyond Kuwei.)

If Yul-Ko thought his way of psyching himself up was droll, he didn’t show it. “Anything. Careful, though, you know silk’s flammable.” Kuwei knew. He’d learned the hard way.

Anything. The word ping-ponged itself around in Kuwei’s head, trying and failing to find any space to collide with and produce a spark of an idea. He thought of his most impressive trick thus far: the snake of fire at the mausoleum in Ketterdam, but he thought that was a thing that only reared its draconian head when his life was in mortal danger, or when he fell in love with a smart, brave, tall, dark boy who wouldn’t like him back. He supposed it was the thrill of either near-death experiences or unrequited love. Both good to get the blood pumping.

So after an uneventful ten seconds of consideration, Kuwei raised his left hand, struck his flint discreetly, and focused on letting each finger burn and dip in the draft that seemed to be coming from nowhere in particular. It was a trick any Inferni village boy could do. Both Kuwei and Yul-Ko were probably aware of this. Still Yul-Ko’s face brightened in delight. Kuwei, suddenly self-conscious, shut his hand into a fist to put the fire out. “It’s not much,” he blustered.

Yul-Ko tapped a finger to his bottom lip pensively. “Have you been to Ketterdam?”

Kuwei had. He never wanted to go back. “I have,” he said, curious.

“There’s an act they do there in the circus, or in that Kerch show, the one with the man and the coins. You’re familiar? They breathe fire. Not Inferni fire, though, just regular fire.” Kuwei’s time in Ketterdam had not been spent on watching the circus, though he’d seen a few Komedie Brute acts; none with fire-breathing. Yul-Ko continued, “I think maybe they don’t do that one anymore. I wouldn’t know, it’s been a while since I’ve visited.”

He bundled the blanket in his lap and tossed it into a soft heap over Kuwei’s kefta. Now that it wasn’t obscuring the majority of his chair, Kuwei could see the wheels, hewn of what looked to be Grisha steel, on the sides of it. If Yul-Ko noticed him noticing, he didn’t pay it any mind. The man struck his ring on the arm rest and in the same moment that the spark jumped up from the contact, Kuwei realised what the ring was for: a shard of flint, compact and effective, set into a silver band, a firestarter on the go.

Before Kuwei could duck, Yul-Ko breathed in deep and blew out. The gust of breath caught as easily as gasoline. He tipped his head up, up, diverting the torrent of flame high as Kuwei, uselessly, flung his own hands up to shelter his head. It was as if the whole world was heat. Then as quickly as it came the fire was gone, gas pulled out of combustion. Just a matter of seconds.

Yul-Ko nodded his head back down like he was landing back on terra firma after years in orbit and levelled a grin at Kuwei. If he seemed fully-grown before, it was gone now in favour of the same sort of boyish energy Grisha teenagers flexing their abilities exhibited. “A bit like that, yeah, _haiyamau_?”

Kuwei ran a hand through the dark top of his head to check for any singed strands; there were none. His new mentor was looking expectantly in his direction. Trying to quell the tremble in his fingers, he dug for his own chunk of flint and wished he had a ring like Yul-Ko’s.

The first Inferni Kuwei had ever spoken to likened summoning to throwing up. You feel it coming, you know, and so you have to force it out. Let it rise. Except when you do hurl, it’s fire, not vomit. For some strange, unidentifiable reason, Kuwei had not found this advice to be helpful. Other Etherealki said it was a bit like snapping your fingers, with a moment where every otherworldly impulse in you brushed up against each other and brought to life a physical change. This was a little more effective.

The most helpful by far, though, was from Maxim. Get angry.

It wasn’t hard for him to get angry. All he had to do was gather every injustice (grievous, petty, anything) of his short life together in his psyche. The first time he’d tried it, he’d found that he had quite a lot of material to work with. Even if he didn’t like dredging up old hurt, there was still no denying its results. If it left him feeling a little residually pissed, he marked grimly the price of Grisha power: a shit mood, which was small when you put it into perspective like that.

Today he thought about missing the morning desserts. He filed this under the Grievous Injustice column. A flicker of indignation at the memory of Sami showing him up by the lake (Miscellaneous Injustice). Another stab of frustration at how easily his pride had been wounded. He focused on the slow beat of his breath, imagined it coming alight, and struck his flint.

The fire was instantaneous, but the feeling of triumph lasted only a split second. Flame towered up from his mouth in a frenzied burst. Through the orange blur he could see Yul-Ko’s distressed face. Kuwei reared back from the inferno and brushed up against something furry; it yowled and jumped away. Someone swore in Shu. Kuwei wasn’t sure if it was him or his mentor. Maybe it was the cat.

Yul-Ko waved a dismissive hand through the air and the blaze sucked itself out of the room. Breathing hard, Kuwei tried to meet his gaze and failed. This time, by the acrid smell, he was sure he had burned a good chunk of his own hair.

“You know, Nhaban,” Yul-Ko started. His casual tone quite resembled that of a grown-up about to unleash a fearsome reproach. “I saw the fire-breathing Komedie Brute show just once. There were only two characters, the mad scientist Doctor Chin, and his ward, the Dragon Boy. It’s also significantly stupider than your average Komedie Brute.”

Kuwei wished he would just skip to the scolding. Yul-Ko continued. “The Dragon Boy was one of Doctor Chin’s experiments. There’s a scene near the start where he comes out of his pod and discovers his new powers.” He pointed his pipe decisively at Kuwei. “And he leaves a scorch mark on the wall about three feet long. I would say life imitates art, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call Kerch theatre art.” He sat back, seemingly done.

“That’s it?” said Kuwei, perplexed.

“Yes, I’m not going to switch your palms with a ruler, you can stop making that face.” Yul-Ko put his pipe back to his mouth and sucked in amiably. “Check that out.” He inclined his head to indicate the ceiling, which bore a black mark where Kuwei’s fire had met the plaster.

“Oh, shit,” Kuwei breathed. “I’ll fix that. Somehow.”

Yul-Ko laughed. It made him look a few decades younger. “There’s no need,” he said. “It will serve well as a reminder.”

For a moment or so they were quiet. Yul-Ko, eager to fill the silence, said, “It’s for the best you’ll never see a Dragon Boy skit, son. The one I went to, they had two actors. The Shu actor was the Dragon Boy. The Kerch actor they painted yellow and made play Doctor Chin. He squinted so hard that night I thought he might have a stroke.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I would enjoy that,” Kuwei said weakly.

“I didn’t. I remember fistfighting the Kerch man after the show.” Yul-Ko grinned, obviously proud of his past misdemeanours. Strangely, Kuwei found that he was a little proud too. “It’s Ketterdam. The vibe gets into you. Say,” he added, diverting smoothly. “You like art?”

“It’s alright?” Kuwei replied. He looked up to the painting behind Yul-Ko, the endless cobalt sky rendered with skill. Art, to him, was more than alright, but he felt like he would never be able to express it. Art was Kuwei’s to love, not Nhaban’s. A secret to be held close to his chest.

“They’ve hung a new landscape over at the training rooms. The ones over at the stables. You should take a look, maybe tonight?” Yul-Ko’s brow furrowed. “The...moonlight really brings out the colours,” he added to explain himself. Eyes on the scorch mark on the ceiling, he shifted the pipe in his mouth surreptitiously and said, “It’s the Fjerdan kind of paint, that’s why, you know?”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no chapter header graphic because i’m Tired

“Incoming!” 

Kuwei had a split second to react before someone bundled in a red kefta came crashing into the weight rack next to him, having just been hurled by capable hands. A thundering of weights collapsed beneath her; the spectators in the direction of the collision scattered like ants. But the Heartrender girl was up and on her feet in a flash. She spat scarlet on the ground and threw herself back into the fight, braids whipping. Her opponent met her halfway. The Grisha audience roared.

“Gross,” said Maxim of the blot of blood she’d left. “Who’s gonna clean this? The next person to get thrown will roll in it.”

“I’ll throw you if you don’t shut up while the match is on,” Matvei warned.

The painting was above the door. Wrought in cumulonimbus greys, it was something of Tsibeya, rather serene for a place where the main agenda was educational roughhousing. But this after-hours brawl seemed nowhere near scholastic. For some mystical reason, Kuwei doubted that Yul-Ko had really intended for him to drop by just to admire the art.

“Is this on every night?” he asked. Matvei’s head dropped slightly to the left as he considered the question.

“No,” he replied. “As far as I can tell, the nights this happens are random. I think maybe there’s no schedule and people just show up when there’s gossip about it.”

Maxim’s brow furrowed, and the freckle above furrowed with it. “Hey, how come he gets to run his mouth and you don’t threaten to hurl him?” he accused.

“Because I hate you, that’s why.” 

The twins had a brief shoving match that looked like it would be right at home in the center of the training room. Meanwhile, the Heartrender seemed to be making headway on her match—Kuwei, tiptoeing to see over someone’s head, winced as she slammed her opponent’s face into the wall. The opponent’s form ceased its thrashing and stilled. 

A tiny Shu Grisha with a wooden whistle around her neck threw her hands up and started to put her fingers down in a quick countdown. The crowd throbbed with the descending chant. At zero, the Heartrender’s opponent, devoid of her kefta, feebly raised one finger of her right hand to the crowd. 

“Did Jin just win?” Matvei stopped shoving Maxim to ask. “Without rending?”

“ _Da, Motka_ , and you missed it,” Maxim crowed, then yelled as Matvei grabbed for his hair. Jin, the heartrender, flicked one thick braid over her shoulder and left her opponent face-down in the center of the room. She passed Kuwei on her way back to her friends, and their eyes locked briefly: hers, gold, pupils big as planets. Kuwei felt the faintest of chills down his spine. Then she was gone, swallowed by the mass of people.

“ _Rending_? You can use ability?” Kuwei asked. 

“Yeah, does it look like this fight has rules?” Matvei pointed out patiently.

The concept was ridiculous to him. By day, the training rooms never saw the light of Grisha power, the exercises inside them being focused on building up core combat technique. The combat instructor that presided over their basic training was a stiff-backed woman who might have been Grisha. Kuwei wondered at first why the students didn’t just close a discreet windpipe or hook a gust of sharp wind around an opponent’s ankle; looking into the instructor’s harpy-glint eye on his first day, he’d realised why.

(According to the Ilyushins, they had once seen a senior Inferni crack and use. His opponent still walked the halls of the Little Palace, nose and cheek red with a burn that would not fade. The Inferni did not.)

“I want to fight,” Kuwei said. Both twins ceased in their altercation to look at him, incredulous. “What?” He shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying to quell the cold rising in his core. It was a fast, precise sort of cold, the kind that was a close neighbour to heat. He wanted to fight; wanted to find out what it was like fighting when his life wasn’t on the line. “I don’t care if I get the shit beaten out of me. I want to fight.”

“Are you sure?” Matvei asked nervously. The heartrender’s opponent had managed to sit up; her nose was mangled red.

“Whatever,” said Kuwei. “I’m going.”

The Grisha with the whistle spotted him pushing through the crowd and brightened. “ _Novomyaso_! This way!”

He turned back and met Matvei’s eyes. _What’s that mean?_ he mouthed silently. 

Matvei set his mouth in a line. Maxim, gleeful, mouthed back: _New meat_!

Kuwei looked to the center of the room. He surged forward, shrugging out of his kefta. He tossed it behind him and hoped that one of the twins would intercept it before it got trampled. The crowd, which had settled slightly following the end of the match, roared to life again when they noticed him break free of the mass of people. 

“What’s your name, kid?” asked the referee. She had to be at least one foot shorter than Kuwei. 

“Ku— _Nhaban_ ,” he stopped himself from ruining his own life just in time.

“Kunhaban?”

“Nhaban.” 

She beamed and grabbed his hand, throwing it upward in a challenge. “Nhaban, everybody! Any takers?”

Kuwei squinted into the sea of crowd. There was a boy inching closer to the centre, the mass of people not yet yielding. 

Suddenly, the previously unyielding crowd parted. It was less a parting and more a stumbling apart, as if pushed by some unseen force. The air had changed. Sami Riyad strode forward and ditched his kefta to the side. It was a perfunctory, businesslike action, as if he was a farmhand about to milk a goat. Kuwei, the figurative goat in question, would not be milked willingly.

He stopped just shy of Kuwei, expression still placid, and inclined his head ever so slightly. Kuwei saw his chance and took it.

Kuwei delivered a quick knee to Sami’s abdomen. Sami stumbled back but righted himself just in time, and the crowd, delighted with such unsportsmanship, cheered. 

Sami, stunned just momentarily, struck back. It was a combination of sheer force and Grisha power: Kuwei barely felt the blow, just the sharp ringing and the whip of his head to the side. It took him a second to grasp his bearings again.

Sami, ever the gentleman, hadn’t hit while Kuwei was stunned. A surge of annoyance spurred Kuwei back into action. He put speed into his strike, Sami countered. He tried again, with a knee, an elbow, and still Sami shrunk back, blocked. It was a taunt if he’d ever received one.

Kuwei bit the side of his cheek until he tasted copper and imagined friction; the rub of a match against the side of the box. There was an oil lantern hooked by the far wall. In his mind’s eye he pictured a city burning; melting into the sea. He bent low and threw himself toward his rival. 

The rest of the fight blurred into light and pain. They clinched, locked, broke apart, exchanged blows; Kuwei felt his fingers suffused with heat enough to scald with touch. Still Sami was swift and unmoveable. It was a little like hitting a windsock. The noise of the crowd had receded to a dull thud at the very base of Kuwei’s head.

Kuwei put weight into his step, and Sami kicked his footing out from under him. He went sprawling. (Somewhere far away, Maxim Ilyushin cheered.) Vision spinning, Kuwei staggered to his feet and clenched his fingers into a fist, his hand igniting at once with a blaze of cornflower blue. The lantern on the far wall went out. He was a phoenix.

Sami ran his tongue over his bottom lip and barely dodged the punch when it came. Up so close, Kuwei could see the sweat on his neck. He aimed for it with the hand that was on fire and felt skin just before Sami leaned left to let Kuwei’s momentum carry him off-balance. Before Kuwei could recover, Sami pushed him as casually as one would push a rowboat from a dock, and Kuwei dumped himself onto the ground, the shroud of fire around his right hand winking out into a billow of smoke. 

Furious, Kuwei scrambled to stand before the referee began her countdown, but Sami was faster. He dropped onto Kuwei—his weight was unexpected, taking the breath out of Kuwei in a split second—and with one skilled hand he knocked the side of Kuwei’s head against the hard floor. Every light went out.

When the miracle of rational thought returned to Kuwei, he registered touch alone—hands under his knees—he was slung over someone’s back. Someone was swearing in admiration in a rough Shu dialect. Eventually the words gained some sort of coherent shape: stupid, did you see that, ha ha, can’t wait for—something. 

“Put me down,” Kuwei mumbled in Sikuri.

“What?” said the person carrying him.

“Oh shit, I think that was Sikuri,” said the other. “Holy crap. His accent.”

“Fuck you and your mother,” said Kuwei, well aware that he was probably butchering the dialect swears. “Put me down.”

“He’s saying to put him down,” the other person told the carrier. “No way, Yul-Gal, you’re like, about to die. If you can walk, I can sing Ravkan opera.”

“Don’t wanna walk,” Kuwei groaned. “I need to…” he trailed off, realising he didn’t know the word in Sikuri. In Plain Shu: “...Throw up.”

Matvei dropped him so fast that Kuwei nearly got whiplash on top of his whiplash. He rolled onto his hands and knees and heaved the contents of his stomach into the grass. Almost instantly his vision cleared. They were halfway across the space between the training rooms and the main dorm building; the night silvery with stars. _Yang guard my soul_ , thought Kuwei, and slipped again from consciousness.

That night, he dreamed like he hadn’t in years. 

He was running across a yellow plain, the muscles in his legs burning fierce, his heart in his throat. Someone behind called to another person in a language that Kuwei didn’t know, a cormorant crying nightfall. He sped up until he was flying over the grass, blue kefta behind him like the tail of a jaybird, eluding gravity.

Something that was not gravity grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him up from the field. Grass dissolved into black sky, darkness swallowing the plain whole. For a while he was suspended, like he’d been caught in the seams of the dream. Then the unseen force dropped him onto the cold black floor.

There was a boy standing in front of him. He’d always been there. He had the same fervent light in his golden eyes that he’d had since childhood, like a wounded falcon. Kuwei wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and wondered how long he’d been bleeding (three years; three seconds?) 

The falcon-eyed boy spoke. “I saw your mother yesterday.” 

“No, you didn’t.”

“Trade me three marbles and I’ll tell you where I saw her.” He tilted his head to the side. It was a childish gesture, like a preteen pretending to be an owl or gull. Kuwei thought he was too old for it, but he didn’t say so.

“I can guess where. Are you dead too, then?”

“Depends on what you mean by dead,” said the boy, straightening to his full height, the whole broadness of his shoulders. “Why? Are you sad?”

Kuwei spat blood on the black floor. “I’m sad that I didn’t get to kill you myself.”

His face pulling back in snarl or smile, the hair on the boy’s head rose black and straight as hackles, as if submerged in nonexistent water. His mouth parted on the verge of a word that never came. Kuwei threw his arms up in defense as he burst into a golden flurry of feathers, falling, flying, bright and blinding as betrayal.


	7. Chapter 7

He woke slowly, eyes opening just a sliver to a white ceiling, closing to the orange glow of his eyelids. His head felt like death. In the background he could hear raised voices, muffled like he was underwater. Determined, he turned on his right and tried to roll out of bed and instead dropped himself onto the ground of the infirmary, still wrapped in the fresh white blanket.

The voices stopped. When Kuwei opened his eyes again, it was like the second coming of Sol Koroleva: shapes and an indistinct face, but mostly light. He winced as pain knifed through his head.

“How are you feeling?” said the person standing above him. He could make out the red kefta of a Grisha Healer.

“Bad,” said Kuwei. It came out as a croak.

“You’re probably concussed,” the Healer offered. “Can you stand?”

“I can’t stand you,” Kuwei mumbled. With effort he flailed upward, but the blanket kept him down. He struggled a little harder and managed to sit up. He tried to ease into opening his eyes, but the light was potent and painful as a legion of white-hot needles, the throb of his head steadier than a second hand on a timepiece.

“I can treat your concussion in a minute, but you might be drowsy for most of today.” The red shape of the Healer moved, probably to treat another patient. Again came the sharp tones of a burgeoning argument. It was a language that Kuwei couldn’t yet pinpoint, which was rare, considering his history.

Slowly the room wavered into focus. He could see the back of the Healer’s head, shaved to a dark scalp. The girl on the bed against the opposite wall was familiar, but only slightly. Kuwei heard the Zemeni word for no a few times, from the exasperated Healer, and realised why he couldn’t follow the conversation.

The Healer returned eventually, tracing a hand across the back of his neck in frustration. “Sorry about that. Sit on the bed and I can help.”

Kuwei kept his eyes shut for the majority of the treatment, so he didn’t manage a glimpse of the work. Besides, he’d seen it all before in the Ice Court, with the Corporalki on parem, fatal head wounds stitching shut to smooth white skin in a matter of seconds, frostbitten fingers growing back. The dull thud of blood in his head waned to a pleasant, fuzzy, fullness.

When he reopened his eyes to the concerned face of the Healer, his vision was decent. He noted a small scar on the Healer’s cheek and took it as a sign that he could see as well as ever. “Thanks. Can I go?”

From his kefta, the Healer produced a small pad of paper and marked something down. “Who’s the king of Ravka?”

Me, thought Kuwei. “Nikolai Lantsov,” he said.

“You’re fine,” said the Healer, waving a dismissive hand. “Don’t overexert yourself.”

The first minute or so was a mess of stumbling on his way out of the infirmary. He took it in stride long enough to wonder where his own kefta had gone—his arms were bare and bruised. From the light on the ground in the hallway, he gathered that it was nearly time for lunch. The corridors were sparse; the rest of the Little Palace crowd were stuck in classes or the training rooms, and Kuwei’s mind ran as he tried to recall what his schedule dictated for the day (shit, what day was it?)

The rowdy trickle of Grisha out of the assortment of doors in the Little Palace saved Kuwei from the torture of thinking. He heard a “Look who’s alive!” from behind him and nearly fainted again from relief. Maxim slapped the back of his head as he approached, and Kuwei came even closer to blacking out, little waves of darkness swimming in his line of sight.

He swatted Maxim’s hand away, glowering. “I wish I wasn’t.”

“You were fucked up last night,” Maxim told him jovially. “If it was five years ago we would have put you in the Shadow Fold to be eaten by monsters even before the witch doctors could check for a pulse. It’s true, we just learned about it in History class.”

“I—What?”

“Body disposal,” Matvei explained gravely. “Apparently it was the cheapest.”

“Fine,” Kuwei said with the knowledge that the twins would be making jokes about Shadow Fold dead bodies for the rest of the day. “Let’s just get lunch.”

“You were amazing,” offered Matvei, nudging Kuwei with his elbow. “Your first fight and you can still walk today. Not bad.”

Kuwei nudged back harder, sending Matvei off-balance. “Next time, I’ll melt his nose off his face. Place your bets.”

“I’d pay good money,” Maxim said dreamily. “Oh, I would break my own arm just to be in the infirmary when the Healers grow his nose back.”

“Don’t dwell. He’s not worth two of your thoughts,” Matvei told Kuwei. “He’s so stuck up that he hasn’t seen his shoes in a decade.” A pause. “Hang on. Look here.”

Kuwei turned to face Matvei, skeptical. Matvei’s mouth drifted slightly open. He reached out to push the mess of black hair away from Kuwei’s eye.

“Sick! Oh fuck, you look bad ass! When did he get you this good, I don’t even remember!” Matvei’s voice rose an octave in sheer glee. “Push your fringe to the other side, you have to show off this purple. Fit for a king, they say.”

“I’m not proud of getting my ass beat,” Kuwei muttered and gave his head a small shake to settle his fringe.

“Don’t be like that,” Matvei said good-naturedly. “A black eye like that is a prize.”

It was Maxim’s turn to reach for Kuwei’s fringe. “Saints forbid your pretty face is marred”—a flick—“by one bruise, huh?” Kuwei dodged his hand. “Come on, take a little pride.” As they passed an alcove, he caught a glimpse of his own face in the reflective glass. Framed by white stone, his expression was sour, the pattern of dark bruise jewelled around his eye. It was, admittedly, not a bad look. He took a second to revel in the perfect tilt of his counterfeit chin. Genya Safin, you are a genius, he thought wistfully.

“Do you believe us now?” Maxim jibed from behind him, tiptoeing to see his face in the mirror.

“Where’s my kefta?” Kuwei thought to ask. Maxim pulled aside his own kefta to reveal the red-embroidered Inferni kefta he was wearing inside. “What the fuck.”

“Keeping it safe, brother,” Maxim told him. They took their seats inside the dining hall, Kuwei already reaching for the glass plate of sugared rolls.

“Well, can I have it back?”

“I’m not wearing anything under it.”

“Saints.”

“I mean, if you really do want it back right this instant,” Maxim reached to unravel the sash at his waist.

“I don’t!” Kuwei yelped. “Keep it on. Just give it to me tonight or something.”

“Why, already eager for more action? Gonna pay Sami Riyad back for the beating? I bet if you wore your kefta you could beat him. That’s how Jin wins, you know, the red gives her opponents a headache.”

“That’s bull,” said Matvei, but his brow scrunched as if he was contemplating the likelihood of it. Just then a Fabrikator dropped into the seat opposite Kuwei, her white hair sticking up at odd angles. Matvei’s eyes lit up. “Sascha, _moya milaya_ , you will never guess what Nhaban has been up to.”

Sascha ran a hand through her crop of fringe, but it did nothing to settle the disarray it was in. “Burned another minister at the stake? Hi, anyway.”

Kuwei was touched by her judgment of his probable activities. He pushed the hair out of his eye for her to appraise the bruise he’d acquired. She leaned forward, attentive. “That’s one hell of a shiner,” she said. “What’s the other guy look like?”

“Annoying,” offered Maxim. As if on cue two Grisha passed their table, blue and purple keftas neatly pressed. Underneath the blue kefta, Sami Riyad was wearing a very high-necked shirt, conveniently hiding the burn he’d gotten at Kuwei’s hands. It took all of Kuwei’s willpower not to choke on his sugared roll in laughter.

Sami’s line of sight met Kuwei’s briefly before he raised his chin and very expertly ignored Kuwei. Instead, it was Ty who walked up to the table they were seated at, silver glasses on his forehead like a geriatric academic. “Nhaban,” came the greeting, and Kuwei shrank down into his seat.

“Ye-es?” his voice rose in an unmusical warble.

“Where were you? You’re still meant to go to morning lab sessions.” Ty sounded as weary of the situation as Kuwei felt.

“I was in the infirmary,” Kuwei said, eyebrows lifting. “I think your friend can testify.” Ty glanced back at Sami, who shrugged his shoulders quite convincingly.

“Look, man, I don’t want to be doing this,” Ty said. “But these are the General’s orders. If you—“

Just then, Matvei stuck his head out from behind Kuwei. “Where’s your girlfriend, Ty?”

Maxim did the same. “Yeah, where’s your girlfriend, Souyinka?”

“Wh—I don’t know?” Ty took one hand out from his pocket to drag it across the back of his neck. “Haven’t seen her yet today.”

“Tell us if you do,” Matvei said and went back to his food. Ty, perplexed, turned back to Kuwei, but couldn’t seem to find anything else to say. He settled for a haughty raise of his own eyebrows before he jerked his head for Sami to follow and stalked away. Sami cast a glance over his shoulder just before they melted back into the crowd. Kuwei met his eyes, but Sami looked away quickly, like a child caught in some illicit act.

“Who’s his girlfriend?” Kuwei asked, curious. “Ty, I mean.”

“You know her,” Maxim told him around a mouthful of food. “He’s dating Jin Kir-Ezenwe.”

“Jin?” Kuwei recalled the heartrender from the previous night with some effort (the memory was pleasantly foggy, but clear enough.) “She’s out of his league.”

Matvei set his glass of water down on the table in solid agreement. “Right? Seconded.”

“Thirded,” Sascha concurred.

“I don’t know, Souyinka isn’t bad-looking himself—“ Maxim closed his mouth halfway through his verdict as Sascha and Matvei turned to look at him.

“No, Max is right,” Kuwei said. “He’s not unattractive. The stick’s just so far up his ass it’s a saintly miracle he can still sit down.”

“Yeah!” Maxim chimed in, thrilled to be agreed with. “You know, honestly, I’d let him—“

“I don’t want to hear this,” Matvei cut his brother off sharply.

The twins fell into their usual back-and-forth, Kuwei and Sascha politely obliging as accessories. By the time lunch was over they had milked the issue to dryness. The day went on; the Grisha scattered to their various programs.

It was in the middle of training with Yul-Ko that an uneasy-looking Grisha Healer appeared, sliding aside the screen door to ask for Kuwei. It was the Healer from the morning.

“Tamar Kir-Bataar has sent for you,” he informed Kuwei. “She says it’s urgent. In the infirmary.”

It was unusual enough that Kuwei kept his pace brisk on the way there. Tamar did not often send for him, and she was not one to use words lightly. If it was urgent by her standards, someone could already be dead.

Thankfully, there were no corpses when Kuwei arrived. Tamar was perched on a stool beside a bed, arms crossed taut. The girl who occupied the bed was speaking vexedly in Plain Shu.

By now his head had cleared enough that he recognised her. It was the Heartrender from the fight, Jin. Her hair was out of its braids and curling quite spectacularly. If Tamar seemed tense, Jin was rigid as a goddess effigy in a shrine. “I was here in the morning, and he told me I could leave, that I was alright,” she insisted, jerking her chin to indicate the Healer standing nervously behind Kuwei.

“It is not about your injuries,” Tamar told her grimly. To the Healer she said in tired Ravkan: “Thank you. You’re dismissed.”

With a start Kuwei realised that they were the only people left in the infirmary. It struck him as unnerving; there were always one or two Healers on duty, even during lunch break or afternoon class. When the Healer shut the door behind him on his way out the gravity of the situation bore down in full.

“Why am I here?” said Kuwei at the same time Jin said, “Why is he here?”

Tamar stood and dug through the cart by the bed, producing a small dental mirror and a wooden swab. When she placed them in Kuwei’s hand, a hunch made itself unfortunately clear.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, no.”

“She had symptoms in her training,” Tamar elaborated. “They called for me.”

“And then you called for me?” Kuwei asked, incredulous.

Tamar shrugged. “Our little expert.”

“You said she had symptoms?” He wandered to the bedside table and peeled a thin surgical glove away from the stack, fumbling to pull it onto his right hand.

“Not severe. Just enough to be concerning.”

“Then I doubt a swab will turn up anything, but I’ll try it.” Kuwei turned to face Jin, whose eyes thinned in suspicion. She glared, but opened her mouth compliantly.

Predictably, the mirror didn’t reflect anything unusual, and the swab came back vague, the cotton end tinged the faintest cinnamon. Kuwei grimaced. “We have a sample for the Fabrikator labs, at least.”

“Can you please tell me what the hell is going on?” Jin demanded.

Kuwei, midway through sealing the sample swab, felt something pass through him like a current. It was less like electricity and more like light itself. “We think you’re on jurda parem,” he said loosely, and shut his mouth in horror right afterward.

“I,” she began, “am not.”

“No, I think you might be,” Kuwei disagreed, slightly winded. With a flick of his fingers he started a small fire between his thumb and index. “I’m going to check your pupils, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind.”

“Tough, but this is a matter of national security.” Jin, expression sour, stayed grudgingly still as he lifted the flame for a closer look. Her pupils were black, with a certain heat to them, swamping the surrounding gold like a miniature Shadow Fold. “You’ve definitely had something.”

Tamar leaned forward in her seat. “Jin, you need to tell us if you’ve taken parem. It is integral that we know where this supply is coming from, and who is dealing it. Life or death, even.”

“I don’t know when I took it,” Jin said, exasperated. “I didn’t even know I was on it until you told me.”

“I do believe you,” Tamar assured her. “But I promise you there will be no consequences if you admit to taking it.”

“Do not good cop/bad cop me,” Jin said. “I told you I don’t know, so would you just. Leave. Me. Alone?”

This time, although Kuwei was anticipating it, the feeling was just as potent. Stronger, even. The slow wash of his control leaving him. When he regained his lucidity he was standing with one hand on the door to the infirmary, poised on his way out. Tamar was close behind him. He watched as her eyes unclouded a second after his had, and they shared a look that was solemnly certain.

If Jin was unconvinced before, her expression betrayed her terror now. “Saints.”

“Hey,” Kuwei said in a way he hoped was comforting. “You’ll be fine. Judging from what we’ve seen, the dose was minute.”

“Last night,” she started. “I think it was last night. Something in the water, maybe. Sometimes I get thirsty between matches.”

“Thank you,” Tamar said, taking her seat by the bed again. “We’ll look into it. In the meantime you should be resting.” Jin nodded.

“The next day or so might be a bit unpleasant for you,” Kuwei explained. “As the drug leaves your system. You might be craving more, but you need to stay in control of it, lock yourself in your room if you have to. But it was a very, very, small dose, so I think you can handle it.”

Jin frowned, but there was no sharpness to it. “You were there, last night. Lost, didn’t you? What’s your name?”

Kuwei winced. “Yeah, uh, none of your glory for me. I’m Nhaban Yul-Gal.”

“Jin Kir-Ezenwe.” A ghost of a fond smile passed across Jin’s face. “And you don’t need to beat yourself up over it. Man’s one hell of a Squaller. And a fighter.”

“No shit.”

“None at all.”

When it seemed like the important issues had all been examined, Tamar stood and took her leave. The two of them watched her go. A small trickle of Grisha Healers began to file back in.

“Listen,” Jin said lowly. “I think you might have more of a problem than you think.”

Kuwei, who had nearly forgotten about the situation at hand, said, “What?”

“I’ve seen some of the other Grisha here do impossible things with their ability,” she began. “There is definitely someone running this show. Inside the Little Palace. Subtle enough that you haven’t noticed it until now.”

A bolt of cold fire slugged down Kuwei’s spine. “Dealing parem?”

“If that’s what you think it is. They don’t advertise it as that, they’re not stupid,” Jin huffed.

“You’ve seen them?” Kuwei’s voice rose. “What in the name of Yang…”

“I don’t mess with that kind of thing,” Jin said quickly. “Never needed it. It’s for Grisha who are falling behind in class. If you don’t have the talent, you can buy it from them at a price.”

“Who’s dealing it, Jin?” Kuwei asked quietly.

Jin’s brow furrowed. “More than one person. None of them have been familiar to me. But they’re always different.”

Kuwei felt very distinctly like he was having the most awful fever dream ever. He pressed a hand to his temple to check if his concussion was resurfacing. “More than one person,” he echoed numbly.

“On nights where we fight down at the stables, usually. Some of my friends buy, now and then.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Kuwei said, helpless. “This is bad. This is very, very, bad.”

“I think you can handle it,” Jin replied, a mimicry of his previous words. Kuwei wasn’t sure whether he was being mocked or not.

“You said they were always different,” Kuwei said.

“Different, yes.” Jin seemed to be trying to grasp some distant memory. “But they had the same...I don’t know. They’re always strangely _sturdy_.”

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unedited bc i am tired also i made some character cards that will be attached to future chapters! for now it’s just kuwei


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